1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to 1) apparatus readable (mechanically readable) security means to prevent forgery of circular or oval or otherwise curved appearing transactional items such as coins, casino chips, merchandise and items of commerce, the apparatus which is useful in reading security indicia on such items, and the process of reading or authenticating code implanted in such items. The invention also relates to the presence of a not necessarily security/identification encoding which is contemporaneous read (at approximately the same time) to enable reading of the security coding with high accuracy, even when the relative movement between the security coding and the reading apparatus is not regular (as when the casino chip is moved [e.g., spun] manually or eccentrically along a strip reader). The invention also relates to a method for counting coins, casino chips and the like, while they are in a storage device, such as a rack.
2. Background of the Art
The present invention relates to 1) apparatus readable (mechanically readable) security means to prevent forgery of circular, round, spherical, oval or otherwise curved transactional items, and especially economic transactional items such as coins, casino chips, tokens, CD's, and the like, 2) the apparatus which is useful in reading such transactional items, and 3) the process of reading or authenticating code implanted in transactional items. The invention also relates to a process and secondary device and means for qualifying or approving materials before they will be accepted into a primary device such as a compact disk player, casino chip authenticator, coins operated equipment, token operated equipments, CD-ROM disk driver, floppy, optical or floptical disk drive, and the like.
It is critical to the security of economic systems that the means of implementing economic transactions not be reproducible without providing independent value into that economic system. This is why actions such as forgery, in which false replications are made of economic transactional items such as checks, currency, credit cards and the like, are serious threats to the security interests of people, businesses and nations. There are severe criminal penalties attached to the commission of these crimes of forgery or counterfeiting because of the potential for widespread societal harm from counterfeiting. Unfortunately, technological advances aid the enactment of the crimes of forgery, pirating and duplication as much as it improves the detection of false replications.
The conflict between forgery and detection is hardly new, tracing back further than Greek history, where the proposition of Archimedes' principle was based on an effort to enable detection of forgery. Archimedes was an advisor to the state, which had commissioned the molding of a solid gold crown for a religious ceremony. The authorities wished to assure that the crown was in fact pure gold, but they could not cut into the crown once it had been made as that would have been sacrilegious. While sitting in a bath tub, Archimedes noted the rise and fall of the water level as he lifted various parts of his body in and out of the tub. He predicted that the volume of water displaced was equal to either the volume submerged in the water or the weight of material which floated on the water. The story has it that he ran through the streets yelling "Eureka!" at the discovery, and upon submerging a block of gold equal to the weight of the crown, found that a different volume of water was displaced by the crown than the block of gold. The two items were of different densities and therefore the crown was not pure gold. The forgery was thus detected.
It is equally critical to the security of marketing systems and outlets that the authenticity of goods are assured and that the goods are not be reproducible without value to the originator of the item. This is why actions such as pirating and counterfeiting of mercantile items such as sweaters, shirts, pants, jackets, furniture, compact disks, cassettes and the like, are serious threats to the security interests of businesses. There are severe criminal penalties attached to the commission of crimes of forgery, pirating or counterfeiting, and there are additional costs attached to shoplifting which adversely affects the legitimate dealers, both of which crimes are presently estimated as costing the economies of the world billions of dollars. Unfortunately, it is difficult for store owners or legal authorities to readily identify knock-off or pirated items at the purchase source (wholesale) or sales source (retail).
It is difficult to detect forgeries today, even with the availability of modem technology. This is especially true where such detection has to be performed in the marketplace (in stores, airports, overseas, etc.) and there is no readily available means for accessing proving technology equivalent to the technology clandestinely used to create the forgery. This makes the forgery of market goods and especially apparel and the like relatively easy in today's worldwide economic system. Casino chips and tokens are another item which has to withstand threats to their security. They have a significant cash value (e.g., $100 and $500 chips are common in casinos), they are relatively simple constructions, they have nothing more than printed visible security (e.g., their color and alphanumerics) and modest weight control, and they can be manufactured quite simply with common materials in molds.
Magnetic media have already been used in various forms to attempt to prevent forgery of merchandise and transactional items. Large plastic clips which are adhesively secured or mechanically fastened to boxes or stapled onto fabric goods are commonplace in stores. U.S. Pat. No. 5,434,917 describes a method for encoding individual signals in plastic cards with randomly distributed ferrite particles.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,430,664 describes a method of verifying and counting items such as currency with both magnetic and optical reading of individual pieces of currency. U.S. Pat. No. 5,444,518 adds optical information to recorded images to prevent forgery.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,429,911 describes a method for depositing rows of magnetic materials onto a surface by etching grooves and depositing magnetic materials within the grooves.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,418,855 describes a visual method of testing items (including magnetic strips) by marking the item with inks or dyes that fluoresce when illuminated. Microprocessors analyze and compare signals with standards.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,444,370 describes the use of scanning devices on two ordered target tracks having magnetic sensitivity. Each output track provides different output signals.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,114,032 describes a means for reducing forgery in which materials, including fibers coated with magnetic particles, are embedded in a transactional item such as paper currency or credit cards. The magnetic fibers may be aligned vertically or perpendicularly to the plane of the material within the transactional item, at least when it is manufactured from paper, by having a magnetic field below the paper train. The magnetically filled item is authenticated merely by the presence of magnetic material which will respond to a magnetic plate or the like. A broad range of means for placing magnetic material onto the surface of the fibers is described. The presence of magnetic fibers and magnetic content can be determined by moving the item with respect to scanning means.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,878,367 describes a magnetic security document containing uniformly dispersed magnetic material onto which a magnetic pattern is imposed which can later be identified by scanning means. It is particularly desirable according to the invention to align the magnetizable particles at selected locations during the manufacturing process.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,995,313 describes a data accumulation system which comprises a homogeneous magnetic material which is capable of being magnetized throughout its surface in discrete patterns. The data may be subsequently sensed from recording media.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,183,989 describes a method for authenticating security papers by including both a magnetic signal and a second mechanically or visually readable signal into paper used for security papers such as checks, currency, tickets, credit cards and the like. The machine reading of the two implanted signals helps to authenticate the paper.
It has been proposed in certain literature that magnetic strips can provide both user identification and authentication of the origination of the item (e.g., credit card, etc.). The procedure attempts to have the magnetic reader obtain not only the usual identification information magnetically written onto the magnetic strip, but also reads the random distribution of magnetic particles between the magnetically written information. Because no additional materials, besides the magnetic strip have to be added, the unique random distribution of particles between the magnetically written information are believed to provide a unique fingerprint for each card. Each fingerprint, once read, is stored in a central information bank so that when the card is primarily identified, it is also authenticated by the fingerprint. This system suffers from the drawbacks that the background signal is extremely weak compared to the magnetically written signal, the back ground signal being weak will change easily (even by the influences of being read repeatedly) so that the fingerprint smears and becomes less reliable, and the amount of data produced in reading such a fingerprint is quite large and would take substantial drive space when multiplied by the potential millions of cards read and fingerprinted. This system is described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,365,586 and 5,428,683.
U.K. Patent No. 1,127,043 describes security papers having threads, planchettes or fibers with magnetic properties distributed therein which are detectable within the security papers. A magnetic thread may be unwound from a bobbin into a paper making mold or incorporated into a central layer of the paper in the course of manufacture. Alternatively fiber-like pieces may be mixed with the stock suspension so that the magnetic fibers are randomly distributed amongst the normal paper making fibers. The magnetic properties, including the coercivity, retentivity, permeability and hysteresis loss may be measured along with the frequency or directional dependence of the properties.
Substantially all of this work is directed towards the reading of flat, relatively rectangular items, or at least items that are passed only linearly through a reading mechanism, such as a conveyor belt which passes under a broad field reader.